Free Internet Services

From email, to photo albums, to calendars and more. It seems as though the folks at Google have a solution (or have purchased a solution) for more tools I use on an every day basis than any other company. Sure, there are a couple things I’d like added, but they’re minimal at best, and they’re most certainly not a reason not to use these services. There are also hundreds of other services out there like these, but none that I’ve found offer the flexibility, the ease of access, and the customization level that the Google services offer. I can get my Gmail in any one of a dozen different methods, and I still get all the filters, tags, and utility regardless of which medium I use. Can’t beat that.

Ever want to just be able to publish your email address to a forum, but afraid of getting a ton of spam? Enter one of the easiest free solutions to this growing problem. Scr.im gives you a personalized URL which you can post a link to which people can visit, and upon passing the captcha they offer (which is one of a couple designs), they’ll be presented with your email address. Here, want to try one?

Try mine: j…@g…l.com.

I’ve not only seen a decrease in spam generated in my inbox, but I’ve been able to give my email address out to more people, and as such, gotten more contact with those I’m looking for. Double win in my book!

I transport a lot of files… Be it from my Mom’s house to mine, or simply from one computer to another, seems I was always wanting a fast and easy way to move a file from one computer to another. I used to be (and to some extent still am) huge into USB stick drives, but they’ve got that horrible limitation that I physically have to move the stick drive from location-A to location-B and back again. What a hassle! No longer I say, enough is enough! I signed up for my free Dropbox account, installed their lightweight software, and now I’ve got 2GB+ of storage, completely free, that I can easily move things from my computer to another. Mom needs to send me a file? She puts the file in the “For Jamie” folder I created on her computer, and it’s now instantly synced onto my computer. Talk about a time and hassle saver that has made the red hair on my head stay a bit more red, and a bit less gray. Can’t say enough good things about this service, just do it, trust me.

A little example of how I use this:

If you’re a Twitter user like myself, you understand the power of being short and concise with your posts. 140 characters, that’s your limit, and when you’re dealing with website addresses like say a link to my sister’s favorite movie of all time:

The Nightmare Before Christmas (2-Disc Collector’s Edition + Digital Copy) – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AIRUOU?ie=UTF8&tag=peospla-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001AIRUOU

If I were to post that on twitter, I’d have a whole 11 characters to describe what exactly the link was, it’s that long. Conversely, I could take the exact same link, run it thru the Bit.ly system, and have a nice short url like:

The Nightmare Before Christmas (2-Disc Collector’s Edition + Digital Copy) – http://bit.ly/BC1vh

Now I’ve got 121 characters to describe my link. Much much better!

So you’ve got your online calendar, and you’ve got your appointments in it all nice and secure. Some appointments private, some appointments public, and you know exactly what you’re doing right? But what about the people wanting to schedule a meeting with you? Or wanting to know when you’re available to organize that next get together? Enter Tungle.

I can give people my tungle.me link: http://tungle.me/JamieHarrell.

From there, you can schedule an appointment with me, find out when I’m available and when I’m busy, and you don’t even have to register with Tungle to do it! Moreover, I don’t even have to log into Tungle unless I get an email alert that someone is trying to schedule a meeting with me, because it automatically reads the information from my Google Calendar and updates itself. So it does it’s job in the background seemlessly! I’m learning to like this more and more as I use it. Final nifty feature to me is, I can post a nice little “availalbe/not available” link here, where people can easily see my status.